Computers are magic.
No, really. There's a crystal at the heart of it doing all the computation, with some support crystals sending power to it and handling some data for it, and a timing crystal keeping everything working in sync. There's countless small liquid crystals acting as a display, changing colors in sync to form images.
@Efi I'm pretty sure FR-4 isn't crystalline, and there's a good bit of glass which is, well, glassy.
@Efi There's polysilicon too, though that isn't amorphous but polycrystalline. I honestly don't know about the metals, but they're definitely not single crystals. Hmm. I am thinking far too far into this.
@Efi Transistors are definitely crystalline! They don't work if they're not; that's why the Czochralski process is so important, it makes large single-crystal silicon boules that can then be further processed to inject impurities where needed.
@Efi Oh, I'm an electrical engineer, so I guess I know a lot of the details!
@Efi Metallurgy is neat!
@Efi There was also arsenic bronze, right?
@Efi arsenic is also very poisonous though I don't know if they knew that then! Bismuth is weirdly non-poisonous considering its neighbors.
@Efi Fun fact: A rarely-used semiconductor used for some ultraviolet LEDs has the ridiculously dangerous formula of HgCdTe--Mercury cadmium telluride.
